I was like most people when I was diagnosed with cancer in July 2012 – surprised, shocked and a bit of a deer in the headlights. “NOW, what do I do?” I asked myself. I have a cancer that is difficult to treat: triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), which means my cancer does not grow […]

The Top 4 Liquid Biopsy Myths It is now possible to map the genomic makeup of a cancer tumor and identify personalized treatment options with just a simple blood test. Known as “liquid biopsies,” this new breed of testing decreases the need for tumor tissue biopsies that are costly, risky, and painful. It opens a […]

In the world of advanced, metastatic cancer, time to treatment is a critical issue. Many advanced, metastatic cancer patients have failed 2‐3 lines of therapies, and time for patients and their families is growing short. Today, there are genomic tests that will sequence a patient’s tumor to identify targeted therapy options based upon the genomic […]

In a newly published study in The Lancet Oncology Journal, James Yang et.al. examined overall survival of EGFR mutation positive patients in lung adenocarcinoma given first-line afatinib or cisplatin-based chemotherapy.1 Although no improvement in overall survival was seen in the overall population, stratification by EGFR mutation type revealed that those with EGFR deletions in exon 19 […]

Of President Obama’s 59 minute, 32 page State of the Union address, one line had the healthcare world buzzing: “Tonight I’m launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes. And to give all of us access to personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our […]

In the dystopian sci-fi film Elysium, the world of 2159 possesses a scanner that can simultaneously detect and treat cancer in a single pass. This technology may seem like magic compared to the cancer treatments of today, but in the words of famed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from […]